SOURCE: Yoder, Carroll. “The Birth of Negritude.” In White Shadows: A Dialectical View of the French African Novel, pp. 79-104. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Yoder focuses on various political and cultural perspectives regarding Negritude, comparing and contrasting the views expressed by Senghor and others during the 1930s and beyond.

One of the more audacious and supposedly noble goals of the colonial writers was to put words into the mouths of the Africans so that they, too, could for the first time contribute to world civilization, it being of course assumed that inferior peoples could not speak for themselves. As long as the colonial writers set themselves up as the only authentic spokespersons for Africa—in view of the ignorance of the tourists and the illiteracy of the indigenous peoples—one could hardly expect the thesis of white supremacy to be denied. Although...